Information Infrastructure

Our era is defined by technology. The potential to provide common people access to better education, healthcare and basic services like banking is possibly the most exciting transformative feature of technology. However, even though India has proved its mettle in the information technology domain the country's performance at providing computing technology and internet access to its citizens has been tardy.

All the BRIC countries had low single digit PC penetration in the early 2000's but since then PC penetration in China, Brazil and Russia has grown to 40%+ while India is still at around 10%.

The individual usage sub-index is proof of this where India is at an appalling 117th rank, while China ranks 82nd. Why is it that while business and the government become assiduous adopters of technology, individual penetration and usage of ICT remains limited?

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A strong information infrastructure is a great lever of socio-economic development because it improves delivery and access to public services and strengthens democracy by giving citizens a platform to participate. But it can only happen in a meaningful way when government, industry and policy makers embrace it as a national agenda.

A broader understanding of the pivotal role of information infrastructure in national development is now emerging amongst policy makers in the country. The government's vision of one e-literate member per household is the right one for India, and to make it happen, we need a strong public private partnership across four main areas.

The first is the building of information superhighways or broadband networks, second, the availability of a broad spectrum of devices, third, locally relevant content and services and fourth, widespread digital literacy and empowerment of citizens.

There is some progress, but it's too fragmented to have real impact. While some states and government departments are moving towards e-governance models and increasing emphasis on ICT as a means to tackle our biggest challenges like job creation transparency in delivery of government services, the ability to scale the best known methods is lacking.

We need to think national and that's not easy in India given the range of diversity we deal with. As part of the National Optic Fiber Network, the government aims to provide broadband connectivity to India's 250,000 panchayats by 2014 and, as per reports, with the deployment of 3G, 4G and BWA India could have 36 crore mobile broadband connections by 2016.

This is a game changing plan. We need to drive availability of a plethora of computing devices. In a country as complex as ours, we must be guarded about making any sweeping assumptions about consumer preference and behavior related to personal computing devices ranging from the smartphone, tablet to the humble PC.

An exciting multi-device play is emerging in India with a healthy balance of creation and consumption devices. The need of the hour is to overcome the debate of which is 'the device' for every Indian and have a concerted focus on making these devices accessible, affordable and easy to use.